one of the most important tools that one needs when setting up the infrastructure in a new-company/startup is a system that allows the following features

• user management
• projects
• wiki/documentation
• ticketing (w/ support for sprints)
• code repository hosting
• code review
• communication (chatting)
• continuous-integration
• integration of the above systems =>
  • able to reference documentation from ticket and vice-versa
  • able to reference ticket in commit message (automated)
  • able to reference code commit in ticket (automated)
  • able to reference doc/ticket/commit in chats
  • able to reference tickets in CI runs and vice-versa

while we've been using atlassian products (jira, confluence and bitbucket) for about 4-5 months now, it has become restrictive due to the following reasons

• paid costs escalate very quickly
• critical components (like code-review) are absent or get missed if we try to keep costs under control

due to this we started looking at alternatives, and phabricator turned out to be an awesome alternative due to

• support all needed features out-of-box (or via plugins like ([sprint][https://github.com/wikimedia/phabricator-extensions-Sprint]))
• free to host (supports unlimited users)
• excellent integration across its sub-systems
• good documentation
• good support over stackoverflow, etc

i have started setting up the system, and will write another post shortly about the steps and hiccups. so stay tuned :)